Enter the lost world of Kairo. Explore vast abandoned monuments. Bring strange and ancient machinery back to life. Slowly uncover the true purpose of Kairo and fulfil a great destiny. Kairo is an atmospheric 3D exploration and puzzle solving game.

Recommended By Curators

Reviews

Kairo is mysterious and elegant and powerfully distinct. Like Fez and Minecraft, it will work its way into your dreams if you're not careful.
8/10 – Eurogamer

It's such a beautiful world to explore, such captivating, simple mechanics, and such a lasting impression.
8/10 – GamesTM

The world of Kairo is like a playable, explorable tone poem.
4.5/5 – Touch Arcade

About This Game

Enter the lost world of Kairo. Explore vast abandoned monuments. Bring strange and ancient machinery back to life. Slowly uncover the true purpose of Kairo and fulfil a great destiny.

Kairo is an atmospheric 3D exploration and puzzle solving game. Developed by Richard Perrin the creator of the white chamber with music by Wounds (Bartosz Szturgiewicz).

Key Features

Exploration - Travel through a strange world full of abstract architecture. Each room is unique so there's always something new to find.

Puzzle Solving - Repair ancient forgotten machinery to slowly bring the world back to life.

Enviromental Storytelling - Exposition without the traditional dialogue or text. The story of Kairo is told through the world itself. The things you find will slowly help you unravel the true purpose of this mysterious land.

Atmospheric Soundtrack - The music helps shape the land and will fill you with an equal measure of wonder and dread.

I picked up this game on a whim when it went on sale some time ago, and while it's not very long (I completed it in three hours) it's unique enough to where I consider it merits a review of its own.

First off, let me nerd out at how good the ambiance is for a couple of paragraphs. The visuals are given sense by an excellent sound design, which kept me on edge for the duration of my playthrough; an achievement, considering the fundamentally abstract and calming nature of the setting. I didn't ever not feel like I was in an old, abandoned, alien place which might fall apart at any second, except when I finished the puzzle in the area and the whole place lighted up and started functioning again, but even then, the sense of foreboding was ever-present. Wide open areas get floaty synths that lurk just outside your hearing, punctuated by the slight pat pat pat of the character's walking, and inside areas each have a soundtrack that fits in well with what's around you. Going in blind, I half-expected the game to throw in some jumpscares at me at some point or another, but the actual gameplay was very deliberate and focused around the "narrative".

The game also shines in its visuals. You might be thinking, "Well, yeah, the game markets itself as a puzzle/exploration game, it's bound to have some nice environments", but some areas are unique enough to actually merit a "Holly ♥♥♥♥, this is amazing". This makes the actual gameplay suffer at times, though, as you're made to slowly walk up and down a ramp to press at buttons to try to figure the room's huge puzzle in an epic journey that was evidently designed to show off every possible angle of the room with no regards to how long it might take to get from one place to another.

The actual puzzles themselves, the main focus of the game, is where it's a bit lacking. For all the praise I might sing of its visuals and environments, it's a bit hard to justify some of the choices regarding their design. I found myself having to constantly check at the in-game hints and a guide I kept handy to figure out the worst of them. There's a special variety that I particularly loathed, which are the kind of puzzle that required you to move against a timer over pressure pads on the floor in a particular pattern, which was made very infuriating with the character's tendency to slide around as if the floor was iced over. I'd say this is the area of the game where it's at its weakest.

I mentioned the game's narrative with quotation marks earlier on in this review, and that is because it's entirely possible to ignore it and never know anything about it, as it's never actually presented to you. It's just "there", and it doesn't care if you pick up on it or not. It's perfectly fine with sitting alone above the dusty door-frame of the room you just dismissed as pure eye candy and never having anything to do with you. It's not terribly complicated or unique, but it gives a sense to your running around, so I do recommend you take the time to trying to figure it out.

Should you buy this game? If you can overlook that it's quite average as puzzle games go, and instead want to be awed by the amazing environments and architecture that it provides, sure, go for it. If not, you'll probably be wasting your money.

I should also mention that it runs excellently in lower-end computers. So there's that.

I'm nothing if not a fan of ambiguity to such an extreme that I can interpret something as a commentary on whatever I dern well please, and Kairo is an experience that excels in creating a blank slate open to any and pretty much all interpretations. This game is simplicity in action, and as I delved deeply into the carved blocks of granite/obsidian/stone/randomness to discern some hidden meaning behind it all, I found myself continually following my own line of thought, like a dog trailing after the scent of a long lost bone he buried somewhere deep in the earth.

I honestly attempted to like this game, but sometimes a little concrete meaning is required after a jumble of meaningless gravel. What I mean is that Kairo is far too ambiguous; I can wander aimlessly through this game and decide what it means for myself until, quite literally, the very end, at which point Kairo finally decides to give me something solid - not okay, guys, not okay.

Kairo is a game that lets you wander through a child's block fort, occasionally posing *cough cough* "puzzles" that briefly halt your progress through the maze of nothingness. I felt as though the developers had a clear idea as to what they wanted to say, sat down in a conference room and said "Hey guys, woudn't it be really cool if we..." and then glued together a jumbled mess of a game.... Sorry, 'experience'. I received conflicting feelings of paranoia and comfort throughout the game, feeling at one time as though I were being watched and at another time as though I were revolting against an omnitient, though not omnipotent, regime, slowly tearing it down brick by ambiguous brick. I think each *cough cough* "puzzle" in this 'experience' was arbitrarily assigned some deeper 'meaning' after the story-board team smoked an acre of some illegal substance. That doesn't fly with me. I am certainly not saying I don't LOVE pushing my smug nose up and saying "Oh yesh, I am a very smart man and love interpreting games and books and movies because I am so deep and insightful" because I do love to say that. I am a smarmy head-up-my-ahem turd; Kairo is a jumbled mess of obfuscated meaning with an alternate ending (oh joy) to encourage further 'experiencing'. That's cheap, guys.

IN BRIEF (he said ironically): Kairo is a block fort, glued together by a toddler hyped up on three gallons of coffee. Then a guy walked by and glued a tagline onto it that belongs at the bottom of an inspirational cat poster. If you have something to say, then say it. If you believe in what you're saying, then you want people to agree with you: make sure they know what you believe.

Kairo is... odd. Everything about this game seems like it's working towards something genuinely fun and interesting but it never came together for me. The puzzles are a little too abstract (any puzzle where figuring out the goal of the puzzle is the actual puzzle isn't a great puzzle, and there are plenty of those), the graphics are almost cool but are a little too simple to hold my attention, and while the minimalistic soundtrack works for the game, it's by no means a draw to it. Maybe if you have an Oculus or something this game is for you, but on just a plain old 2D monitor, I'm not really feeling it.

For a game that tosses you into a world without an instruction manual, I found it pleasant to play. I feared I would be frustrated beyond hope since I'm pretty poor at puzzle games, but the atmosphere I saw in video reviews convinced me to try it anyways. Answers to the puzzles just come to you as you take in the scenery. A lot of other puzzle games require a decent memory and some conventional wisdom, neither of which I have. This game doesn't have this requirement to enjoy.